The morning of Maya Jewell Zeller’s book event at Seattle Central Library, I packed a box of photo albums to send to my mother. There are two stories of how I came to have these albums and to whom they belonged, just as there are two stories of Zeller’s birth (one based on the moon, the other a calendar). The tension is in the difference between these two things, how they are both true and also how they cannot be fully reconciled. This tension is what’s exciting about the book (a memoir in essays) and about life, and I deeply enjoyed exploring the nuance of the thinking in Raised by Ferns as Zeller chronicled growing up poor but far from impoverished. Below are a few things that helped me think deeper about topics that interest me.
“The Privilege Button”
It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that the title of this essay refers to a garage door opener. At the event, Zeller told us how she laughed every time she used it to open her large garage in a subdivision of Spokane. One of the many places she lived as a child was in a garage and this essay blends clips from her HOA’s bylaws with details of her childhood as well as things she learned about class in the process of becoming an educator. She also writes about the complex feelings around making a more permanent home, first in the city and then in the suburbs.
This summary is reductive because I can’t adequately convey in a few words how beautifully all these threads are woven together to form a larger narrative about class and socioeconomic mobility that is richer than anything I’ve read on the subject in a long time (maybe since Dorothy Allison). I think it’s richer because Zeller chooses not to conform to tropes (in her life or her writing). Lines like “Suburbs were those places…where Santa always brought gifts, and where people believed it was Santa” carefully capture the differences between her experience growing up and the life she’s making with her family. When Zeller writes, “could a person sustain a working-class sensibility of the world and—more importantly—instill it not as theory but as practice in her children if they lived in a social bubble” I saw some of the same questions I’ve asked about my own parenting in a city where it’s normal to drop more than a thousand dollars on the newest phone (for kids even) just because it’s new.
“I want my children to inherit more than whatever impermanence exists in money. I want them to scavenge their own minds and the world around them and waste nothing except time, wandering about in their own hunger to be animals, to find and to wonder and to remember what shapes them.” – Maya Jewell Zeller, “Scavenger Panorama” in Raised by Ferns
This is the essay I read aloud to my husband to start a conversation about the differences between our backgrounds (mine being the more privileged) and to get ready to read him some of the essays I’ve been working on about social class as I think about our trajectory in the wake of me leaving my high-paying tech job to try and make a life I actually enjoy. Zeller’s essays are better, though, more embodied and layered. They give me something to aspire to.
“Ruin Porn”
“We never called it foraging. Those who eat, by necessity, what’s wild and/or found—collage eating—just call it food.” – Maya Jewell Zeller, “Sestina for Foragers” in Raised by Ferns
Zeller actively calls out ruin porn in an essay by that title and echoes similar ideas more subtly throughout the book. She doesn’t want to be your poor kid who redeemed herself. She doesn’t want you to look at her childhood as a tragedy of circumstance. If “[t]houghtful, textured portrayals—of a range of differences, large and small, across lives” is the antidote to ruin porn, to the fetishization of poverty (or any other experience), then Raised by Ferns is a helluva dose (and beautifully written, too).
I don’t actually know Zeller, but we both travel in the small circle of Pacific Northwest writers. She’s close friends with a poet I adored in grad school (and after but she moved) and it was at Zeller’s event that I learned Nance van Winckel (who I did not read but whose work I love) had died earlier in the summer. I felt further kinship with Zeller as she explored what it means to be stable, the creative wonders of scavenging, and what it means to have time to think after having children, and I look forward to reading this book again as I absorb the layers of her thinking.
Before boxing up the albums, I leafed through the pages of my parents’ lives before I was born to see what I might like to photograph or scan in case this was my last chance. I saw two kids, they were in their twenties but that seems so young to me now, posed with their respective VWs and with their parents. I saw my dad playing guitar while my mom sat adoringly at his feet. I sent my cousin a picture of her mother and she said, “I don’t know that lady, and it’s before she knew me. I have strong feelings of ‘that’s not my mom.'” But I knew these were my parents. What I didn’t know was how to reconcile the stories I’d grown up with and my own childhood memories against these pictures. With Raised by Ferns at hand, I have a guide to writing into the richness of that gap, and I’m grateful.
If you also want to read beyond poverty porn and stretch your own thinking, pick up a copy of Raised by Ferns from Bookshop.org. It helps keep indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.
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